This article also appears on the New Statesman‘s blog, the Staggers. Is Britain full? In the 1930s the Daily Mail campaigned against letting in German Jews on the basis that it was; since then the UK has accommodated more than 10 million extra people. But what was once a far-right trope is rapidly becoming conventional wisdom […]

Tonight’s Panorama was a disgrace. It took as given that the population will rise to 70 million by 2030 when previous ONS projections have been wildly wrong. In 1965, they predicted a population of 75 million in 2000. It turned out to be 59 million, 16 million lower. It portrayed extra people solely as a […]

The Times asked a number of people, including me, whether Britain is full. The country's supposed overpopulation is now the argument of choice for opponents of immigration, many of whose real objection to having more foreigners around is cultural. After all, Manhattan, Paris and Kensington & Chelsea are the most densely populated areas of the […]

Net immigration to the EU – immigrants less emigrants – was 1.9 million in 2007, according to Eurostat. Since the EU population is just shy of 500 million, the immigration rate was 0.38%. Spain had the highest level of net immigration: 702,000; Italy was second, with 494,000; Britain third, with 175,000. The Netherlands experienced net […]